Ordinary Battles
by Telaka
Summary: When all is said and done, and the HARDsuit is off, she’s still just an 18 year old girl walking home alone at night.
1. Chapter 1

_**Ordinary Battles**_

_Summary: When all is said and done, and the HARDsuit is off, she's still just an 18 year old girl walking home alone at night._

_Disclaimer: No money was or ever will be made from this. Unless of course the studio want to hire me as a writer as a result of reading this._

_A.N_

_I started writing this about two years ago, all up to the part where Priss asks Nene what the same of her stuffed weasel is. Two years is a long time. Since then I've finished school, gone to college and been accepted into university. As a result this short piece is a bit dated in terms of how my writing style and thought process have also moved on with my life._

_Although I've tweaked it a bit and finally given it an ending I'd like to keep it mainly as it is, crappy title and all. It's not bad really, a lot of my other stuff from two years and so is just terrible, but I still enjoyed reading over this as much as it made me cringe and laugh at times too. All I advice is that you don't read into anything too much, it's just me exploring themes of friendship and such, as I like to do the most._

_Telaka_

----

With a ripple of fatigue that crawled irritably through her taut muscles and a stifle of a long-overdue yawn, Nene twined her fingers together and reached as high over her head as she possibly could and indulged herself in a lavish stretch . With the way she was feeling tonight she really believed she could reach that grey ceiling above her cubical, touch it with the very tips of her fingers if she wanted to, and call 100 points for the victory to boot.

23:58

She blinked wearily at the bottom left corner of her pulsing computer screen and then cracked another childish smile, right at the corner of her lips.

"Alright, about time already!"

Her hand reached out greedily to grab for her purse and her plush weasel toy when another came down in an impenetrable clamp around her wrist and stopped her dead. With the great dustbin lid of a hand keeping a faultless grip on her, Nene seized a frightened gasp in her throat and felt every muscle of her lithe body tense up.

No sooner had she caught the gasp of surprise on her tongue though than she looked up and let her face drop into a sharp frown.

"Leon! You big poo-head! Let go before I scream."

The towering cop who dwarfed her figure completely, with a crop of silvery brown hair shadowing a set of weary hazel eyes, instantly dropped the small blonde's wrist as the name-calling penetrated his sensitive temper.

"Hey, what you—"

"Ah ah! If you want to ask a favour then you have to treat the one you're asking nicely, Leon."

Daley, happily the brains of the duo, (and a fact made stereotypically obvious by his unnecessarily large glasses) stepped in behind with something of a best-pleased smile. He shared it with Nene who had already sussed as much out that Leon needed a favour and proceeded anyway to continue gathering up her stuff.

"Go away Leon, it's clocking-off time for the night and I'm going home right now to have a much needed bath. Ask me again tomorrow and I might be nice and do what you want then. But only if I'm feeling perky."

With a flash of a triumphant smile she made to open the door of her cubical but quickly found that Leon's bulky size elevens were helping to block the way.

"Hey, let me out! I wanna go home!"

Withholding a tiresome sigh, Leon dismissed the young girl's demand and instead proceeded to pull out a small black computer disk from the inside of his heavy leather jacket.

"I just wanted to ask you before you left if Priss's house is on your way home?"

Nene's mouth developed into a small, considering 'o' shape. Then with a sneaky glint across her young blue eyes she began to blush with excitement.

"Oh, a _love_ note! How sweet!"

Leon jerked back a step. "Wha--what? _No!_ No, it's just some information I gathered on the more unusual boomer attacks that I thought she might want to take a look at, or at least give to her boss to see. It's nothing special, really, it's just in case she manages to spot anything useful in there, like a pattern maybe." He coughed and replaced his babble with his more natural professional cop tone. "Can you tell her that for me as well?"

Nene prolonged a thoughtful gaze, knowing that if she was good at nothing else other than with computers then she was at least good at teasing Leon (and hacking into his emails later perhaps…)

"Sure. I'll have to make a small detour, but that's not a problem, not for the sake of _love _anyway."

With a snatch the peppy one of the Knight Sabres seized the disk and pocketed it for herself along with her purse and her weasel.

"Goodnight Daley; goodnight Leon-weon."

With a dash she was gone before he could even begin to growl.

----

A shiver shot between her shoulder blades, brought on not by the biting cold of the stolid night but by fresh memories of yesterday, yesterday being the reason why she was feeling as high as a kite today. The shiver ran just where Priss had sat her hand on Nene in congratulations. It made her remember so very excitedly her first ever solo victory, when for once the 'burden' of the group had managed to tear through the pulsing flesh of a crazy rogue boomer on her own and crush its beating core between her very fingers until it had jittered to a final stop right under her feet.

Nene remembered it as eagerly as anyone holding a treasured memory in their pride could. She listened now in her head to the rippling silence that had hung in the charged air right after she had done it. She recalled perfectly as she had sat perched on the head of the fallen monster seeing Priss and Linna stand together on the torn road in front of her, paralysed by dumb shock and utterly speechless at what they had just witnessed. She herself had reacted none the livelier as she had caved to her trembling knees and blinked a stunned gaze.

Things had managed to finally come to head in the van on the way back to their headquarters. Sylia and Linna had all but leapt on Nene with their brash pride and shameless surprise. Sylia offered a modest apology to her for all the past acquisitions she had made claiming that Nene was nothing more than a liability on the battlefield at times and Linna praised her resulted efforts until she simply ran out of words for it. Nene felt she could do nothing more but split a grin and had begun to gloat along with their commends for her. Even now as she was recalling all this in her mind she couldn't help but skip a few steps on the pavement and smile.

Priss had been silent and bothered to say nothing more than she absolutely had to during the journey back to Sylia's home on the other side of town and Nene knew she should expect little else from the callous field leader, as nice as it would have been for her to wing a thumbs-up her way.

However that pallid disappointment changed when Nene found herself standing at the sandstone entranceway to Silky Dolls, where she cautiously stuck her nose out into the shifting autumn winds and prepared to make leave for a cold walk home.

"Wait up a sec', would you?"

Nene had made a sharp turn on her heel, surprised if nothing else to see Priss standing not ten feet away from her in the building's reception area. Hand on hip, her eyes as ever shadowed by a jagged fringe of dark brown hair, she watched the young computer prodigy with a considered and curious gaze.

"You did good tonight, Nene," she spoke in her usual cool tone. "Surprised me."

Nene painted a wide grin on her face. "Thanks Priss. You know I could have done it all along, I just thought you and Linna liked getting all the glory of crushing the core. Didn't want to ruin the best part for either of you."

Slowly, carefully, Priss smiled. "Yeah, right."

A short silence lingered between the two as Nene kept the doors open to the autumn winds, her short cut of silvery-blonde hair whipping over her forehead as she turned her neck to take another peek outside.

Then a slight weight rested on her back, sitting calmly between her shoulder blades, warm and steady. Nene spun her gaze around again and locked eyes with a quietly smiling Priss.

"See you tomorrow, Nene."

And with that the enigma that was their field leader was gone, the engine of her motorbike ringing through the sweet air of Tokyo as it revved up to illegal speeds and ducked behind a hill on its journey towards home.

"See you too," Nene mouthed then, repeating the words now as she finished reciting the memories, all the while lightly trotting her way home, or at least as far as she could go her usual path before she reached the detour route to Priss's.

She felt it growing colder with every step she took, each grey shadow that slipped over her small frame causing her to pull her thin waistcoat tighter around her chest, which did no good anyway to keep her warm as the winds grew harsher still in the bitter air. Yet nothing could detour the smile that occasionally snuck onto her face as she constantly thought back to those same treasured moments.

With the route that Nene was taking through back streets and side pavements light was minimal at its best. She had young, keen eyes and a perfect sense of where she was going, but no less felt a streetlamp or two wouldn't hurt to have around.

Five minutes from her own home, she stopped under a notorious colossal motorway bridge, standing in the underpass beneath it with shivering knees. Graffiti hugged the curved walls around her, the fluorescent colours glowing eerily in the passing lights of vehicles crossing the bridge above. Here was where her new route began if she went straight ahead towards the boulevard of abandoned shops and apartment blocks instead of left towards her own cosy neighbourhood.

For a fleeting moment she felt nervous. Then her mind latched onto the yesterday she had just raked over, of her glorious defeat and newfound confidence. With a puff of her chest and a flex of her fists she pouted a lip and exhaled sharply through her nostrils.

"Don't be stupid Nene, there's nothing out there that you can't handle now. Not after you destroyed that boomer solo-style."

She peered onwards into the gaping darkness ahead of her where the end of the underpass and the beginning of the boulevard hid somewhere in-between the hungry shadows. A few blocks beyond that was where Priss's trailer was, somewhere between soiled alleyways and abandoned deconstruction sights. It would take her ten, maybe fifteen more minutes to get there on foot.

Nene assured herself in her thoughts. 

However, something nagged at the back of her mind, something uptight and nervy as she began to walk on again. A bad feeling, a flaring sixth sense, something impossible to pin down that wouldn't let out the warning lights.

"Don't be stupid," she growled at herself, half in annoyance, half in self-assurance.

There wasn't a sound to be heard or a movement to be caught in the corner of her eye. All was still and peaceful and abandoned as it should be at this time in the night. There was maybe the odd feral cat or scavenging rat, but nothing that could lunge out and throw any real serious damage at her.

She charged on, chin up, eyes forward, legs set to march as she clung to herself in determination to beat the cold that gripped her body. Her optimism was short-lived though as her foot landed dead centre in a soiled puddle, and almost instantly Nene felt the putrid water begin to soak up her sock and turn her skin a miserable, soggy cold.

"Stupid pothole," she began to murmur bitterly. "Where are all the stupid boomers when you really need them? Whole stupid road needs fixed. Stupid—"

Suddenly a cold hand snaked out of the darkness and sat calmly on the nape of her neck, hard, calloused fingers curling forward and flexing loosely around her beating pulse. She felt her muscles seize up and her heart skyrocket as a rough voice whispered in her ear from behind.

"Be careful now, sweet'eart, 'oose home you be callin' stupid there. Some'f us gotta sleep here t'night y' know."

Around her peripheral vision objects began to flicker into view under the light of the passing bridge vehicles. A scarred gaze, a chipped knife, a rusty pistol; slowly the pieces of an eight-man gang began to emerge from the shadows of the underpass.

The hand that rested on her neck eased forward towards her mouth as her eyes grew wide with the reality of the looming situation. His hot breath trickled over her back as he peered down her shirt collar. His nostrils flared and the putrid smell of his rough-living smacked her across the face as she felt her dinner curl in her jittery belly. His fingernails tangled into her short hair and she could almost feel the hungry smile break out over his chapped lips. He was taking his time, but he was honing in for a long awaited attack.

Suddenly she ripped away her paralysing fear and she snapped quickly back into her senses. Hardly thinking, but gripping onto instinct and reflex, her left leg shot up from behind her and made a satisfying connection with the man's sensitive and fair exposed crotch.

"_Bitch_," he whimpered hoarsely as he crumpled away from Nene and she sprung at her chance to take off into the darkness ahead of her, daring not to look back even for a second.

Her bad, unfortunately.

There was a whistle of metal through the air, but before she could even register the sound there was a wet _thud_ and instant blinding pain in her left shoulder.

She screamed, for all the good it would do her in this secluded home of Neo Tokyo's underworld. Her voice cracked the icy air and wild rats scurried frantically away wanting to be no part of this. Falling hard, Nene felt the skin on her knees tear as she skidded a little across the gritty surface of the pavement. She tried to grab for the knife but it sat cleverly just out of reach from her fingers, still where she could catch a glimpse of the wooden handle progressing from her shoulder blade.

"Gonna be 'n easy pickin' tonight men," the callous handed leader, now recovered, sang with a disturbing glee in his voice as he began a fresh approach on Nene. For what he was doing, making a target out of a lone eighteen year old girl with no less than seven men backing his ass, he was a coward. The dangerous thing was that he knew this and was shameless to admit it, and so felt free to do whatever he had to do to get what he wanted from her.

Crouched with her arms wrapped around herself in tight embrace, her eyes blinded by salty fear and her lips trembling beyond control, Nene nonetheless dared to turn round to her new nemesis. She caught his glazed stare, a slight madness trimming his bright hazel irises, along with a dash of age. He pulled his lids wide with a fixed grin and flaring nostrils. He radiated with lust for fear and respect and around him he got it. He looked hungry and happy to be doing what he was doing. He reminded Nene of nothing less than a rogue boomer and suddenly she snapped back into action again.

With one spectacular twist of her spine she reached out and grabbed finally with success for the hilt of the knife. Her fingers wrapped around splintered wood and with another scream, of determination this time, she pulled the blade free.

It slid clean out of the infant wound and fresh waves of pain slid over her back. She gritted her teeth though and held dear to her new and only weapon, throwing herself to her feet and facing the enemy with it and a trembling lip.

"If you knew who I really was, you wouldn't have thought about making this mistake!"

As terrified as she was, Nene saw no hurt in attempting to put on a bit of bravado, a show if it so worked. She narrowed her eyes and gritted her molars, her right fist clenching around the knife handle with her knees still shaking.

The leader stood not five or six meters away from her, his thinning brown hair rustling in a bitter wind. He bared another grin, his own fists and his seven-man army standing at a tense ready, all against one eighteen year old girl, walking alone at night with nothing more than 1500 yen, a toy weasel and her clothes on her to give.

In a minute she would very likely have none of these anymore.

She could feel the wet heat of the fresh wound reaching to unbearable heights now and her head turn light as way of compensating for it. What little rational sense she had began to cry out in a small, desperate whimper, curled in the back of her mind.

'This isn't a rogue boomer Nene. This is just a man, a human being like you. If you kill him, you're a murderer. You can't, you can't cross that line… So what the hell do I do now?'

She had little time to strategise as the gang made their next move with one of the younger men from the back coming forward with a small gun.

"Throw's your purse," he growled, ever keeping an expressionless face.

Nene fought with the urge to flicker her gaze onto her hip, where her purse was stashed in the side pocket of her denim shorts along with the disk she was to deliver. She thought for a moment, sinking into an eternally long pause she imagined, before she chose her tactic and decided to play it quite dangerously, to lie.

"I don't have a purse with me."

She felt now she wanted almost anything but to give these men what they were out to purge – a pay check for their doings, an incentive to carry on another day, next week and for the rest of their lowly lives to come.

Unfortunately money was not the only thing they were sniffing for. The man with the gun shrugged.

"Just 'ave to take what else we can then."

Nene felt her heart drop. The gunman readied his weapon with a hollow _click_ and the leader pursed his bone-dry lips as Nene spun on her heels and did the last thing left for her to do – run.

One man's crowbar shimmered in the headlight of a motorbike as he prepared to go after the girl with the crude weapon. He blinked as the flash caught the bottom of his gaze, wondering with nagging curiosity where it had come from. He stumbled back amidst frantic cries to God when he spotted the motorbike itself.

The black and red beast came charging forward from the ebony depths of the underpass on one wheel, revving and growling with the grit of its rider. Thrown back down onto two wheels it slung easily around Nene as she continued to run and it tore head first without a beat of hesitation into the huddled gang, leaderless now as that desolate man had broke off to take chase of Nene. They scattered like birds, diving and ducking to escape the 200 odd pounds of raging steel and rubber, disappearing into the dark as suddenly as they had come from it.

Spinning 180° with smoke churning out the back wheel the bike turned and grew ready to charge again, this time with only one target in mind.

Nene stumbled forward in a broken run, tripping and flinching, pale and drawn with her injury but driven on with determination and fear of the idea of getting caught as she felt the gang leader close quickly in on her. The very tips of his filthy fingers brushed across her exposed wound as he made a greedy grab for her and missed by all too close a margin.

Behind them Priss revved her engine again. She had hesitated long enough in the street after hearing the screams, tired and drawn out from the gig she had just played, desperate then to get home and crash. Now she wasn't dare going to waste another second. She kicked off from the ground and the bike raced forward as she urged it into a fast but steady speed.

The gang leader threw himself forward in one last desperate snatch for his victim and the two of them went down faster than a stone in water. They rolled together, tangling and tumbling as the leader tried to gain a firmer grip and Nene tried to fend it off with ebbing strength but gut determination.

Despite her flailing efforts he had her pinned quicker than she was able to realise what he had done at first. His clammy hands squeezed down on her elbows, all sick glee from his eyes gone to be replaced instead by hell-raising fury.

Nene had always wanted to die in battle, if her time came before she was grey and old. Sometimes, when there was nothing better to think about, she fantasised over the bittersweet glory of perhaps jumping in front of a rogue boomer's attack to save Priss or Linna. Or laying down her final heroic punch, the one that tipped the winning scale for the team, before one last punch was thrown back on her. Even if she went down in the crossfire of the A.D police, as long as she was in her HARDsuit fighting until the end, she would be happy enough to call it her day.

Not, however, when she was whimpering and squirming under the rattling breath and warty grip of an aging man clinging onto a grim life full of nothing more than purge and rape. Not when, in his eyes, she was nothing more than another eighteen year old blonde stepping out of her territory at night and into his through naivety and a dumb swollen head.

Her foot shot up and struck him square across the stomach. He flew off her in an instant and she didn't even consider hesitating this time. Suddenly the feel of the knife came back to life in her ghostly white fist, the splintered wood of the handle making her palm bleed as she was holding on to it so tightly and so urgently.

With his arms slung around his stomach, the leader strained to straighten up on his knees. Something was flooding his crumpled body with a washy yellow light, like that from a car headlight… or a motorbike's.

She stood tall and calm above him, one foot on the ground as she held the sleek bike between her calves. The bitter night winds ruffled her worn red leather jacket and jagged cut of coarse brown hair. Her face was hidden under the streamline build of a helmet, the sheen of the navy visor reflecting one lone man's contorted face. She seemed to be looking at him, looking down on him as he squinted in the light. Then she looked up a little, and nodded.

"Wha—"

Nene plunged the knife into the centre of his chest in an impulse of guttural rage and blood draining fear. A horrific scream sliced through the grey night, cracking the remaining silence of the neighbourhood, sending those who still lingered from the gang scattering into holes and alleyways. Then with a shiver he slid away and fell to the ground with a final _thud_. Beside him the knife clattered to the cracked cement ground, and then with them the unconscious form of a murdering eighteen year old girl.


	2. Chapter 2

_A.N_

_I'm not usually into the habit of splitting my short stories into chapters but this kinda needed it to keep the suspence at the end of chapter one going, just a little y' know?_

_---_

The sharp pounding on the trailer door did no favours for the injured that the little metal hut was housing. Hardly aware of a thing and trapped in a state of semi-consciousness, Nene struggled to register it, or even tell its rhythmic pulse apart from the dull throb in her back. She felt her arm jerk involuntarily under her torso, and with that action vaguely realised she had been laid out on her stomach on a bed, somewhere.

"_Alright_, ah'm coming already, just keep it down!"

Priss…

Priss marched across the bedroom floor, throwing the door open and barely catching herself short of slamming it shut again. With all the subtlety in the world she gently closed it over and then proceeded to march again up to the front door.

"Who is it?"

There was a pause on the other side as the person knocking, it seemed, had expected the door to be opened before any questions were asked.

"It's Nigel. I've got your bike."

Priss hesitated for a second, surprised without managing to show it. She chanced a glance back at the bedroom, then decided with a heavy sigh that seeing as she hadn't the energy to lie, the truth in this case with this particular individual wasn't going to hurt anymore than the night already had.

"Can you tie bandages across a shoulder blade?"

She listened as the bike was propped up against the rusty hull of the trailer.

"Open the door Priss."

Grudgingly, with only the truth that anyone had to be better at handling the injured than she was prompting her, she did as Nigel quietly demanded.

"How'd you find my bike?"

"Got a callout. Your bike happened to be lying in the path on the way of my callout."

"Shouldn't you be getting back to that then?"

Nigel shrugged. "You're looking alright for someone who needs her shoulder blade wrapped."

Priss stepped aside with lingering reluctance to let him in. "It's Nene. If you don't mind, she could really do with some proper help."

He didn't say a word. He understood Priss perhaps better than she would have liked. For her to have brought Nene to her trailer, inevitably into her private life where few ever went, meant something had happened that was serious enough to pull on her deeply buried compassion for the girl. Something had made her remember she had a reluctant liking for Nene and a friendship with her that was valuable enough to go out of her way and help her in the name of it.

Brushing past her he reached for the bedroom door and opened it. And there was Nene, stood right in front of him, stark naked from the waist up.

"N-Nigel?"

"Nene?" Priss frowned slightly, crossing the room and pushing the mechanic aside to come face to face with Nene. Something softened in her hard gaze though as she looked upon the trembling teen with a fading scowl. She hesitantly put her hands around Nene's cold arms in way of shy condolence.

"You shouldn't be up."

Nene struggled to smile whilst her eyes watered in confusion.

"I shouldn't be alive for being so stupid."

With a sigh that hid the emotion of pity Priss all but never showed for people, she took Nene's wrist and guided her back into the bedroom and onto the unkempt single bed rammed into the corner of the shambled box bedroom. Silently Nigel followed behind, perfectly unaffected by the girl's bareness.

"Nigel's gonna have a look at your back while I ask you what the hell happened and why you were strutting around Old Blunt's dig at this time?"

Nene sat with a sag in her spine as she slouched forward on the edge of the bed, Priss perching beside her. With her face a sickly white and her eyes a reddened mess, she seemed entirely unaware of her nakedness and that a man close to twice her size and age was caressing her back as way of assessing the wound.

"It's not too bad, the bleeding's stopping. But I think there's some debris in there and it could probably do with stitches, otherwise there's a good chance it'll get infected. She should probably be taken to the hospital."

Priss instantly shook her head as she watched Nene's stare glaze slightly and slip to the floor.

"No, too many questions at the hospital."

Nigel leant back. "If you didn't want any questions then why did you leave the body lying?"

Priss clenched her fists and glared up at Nigel. "What the hell was I supposed—"

Nene snapped to attention. "No… No, I didn't kill him, did I?"

She dug her tearful gaze into Priss's hard eyes and fearfully demanded an answer.

"Did I?"

Priss nodded. Nigel spoke off-handedly.

"If you hadn't Nene, someone else would have. Blunt's been asking for it for a long time now. If the police hadn't gunned him down someone's boyfriend or brother or whoever else would have. You just happened to have gotten there first."

Her trembling blue gaze fell away from Priss's. Priss looked up at Nigel and his bloodied hands.

"There's a med kit under the sofa in the living room. It should have everything in it you need."

She held her stare on Nigel a second longer than was needed. With a wordless nod he acknowledged that he understood and left.

Priss wasted no time in romanticising her words.

"Look Nene, the guy was scum. You saw his eyes right, there was no more of a conscience in them than in a rogue boomer, was there?"

Reluctantly Nene reflected and nodded.

"Then that's basically it, you killed another boomer. And if you hadn't then he'd have carried on doing what he tried to do to you tonight only to other girls less capable than you. This town's just one nutcase down now, one robot less. Don't justify his death with your guilt and don't make me slap you and take you to Sylia." She took a deep breath with her eyes closed and let it go as a sigh. "Alright?

For a long time there was no answer, nothing was said between the two. In the next room Priss caught the sound of Nigel dragging out the med kit from underneath her sofa and placing it on the table, rummaging through it to make sure it did have everything he needed, biding time before he was called back in.

There was a soft thud on the bed and Priss turned back round to face Nene. Between them lay a stuffed weasel toy.

"You got me it for my birthday last year, remember?"

Priss stared at it for a while. She looked at its surprisingly lifelike cheeky gaze and tilted an eyebrow up at its hidden grin sewn underneath the furry muzzle.

"Yeah."

No one had remembered her birthday that day last year, before Linna had even hit the team. Certainly not Sylia who had sent her into battle amidst the peak of one of her more infamous hissy fits. None of her colleges at the ADP Intelligence Management Centre had even delivered her a card, amongst them being a guilty-to-the-day Leon and Daley who at the time were beginning to use her services far more liberally than they ever had before. Only Priss, it seemed, had cared enough to mark the celebrated date down on her calendar. The present hadn't even been thought of, hadn't been carefully hand picked or planned in advance or anything of the such. It just happened to have been sitting there front row at the kids' stall in the shoreline park boardwalk, which was South of her end of town and where she liked to go whenever the claws of cabin fever began to wrack her brains. The weasel had managed to remind her of Nene in some vague and almost pointless way and thus she had bought it for the pitiful price it was selling at. That and a card and a packet of her favourite sweets.

"Sylia's face was so funny when you told her to cut me a little slack because it was my birthday. I thought she was going to die of embarrassment."

A tiny smile twitched onto Priss's face and she spilled a little laugh. "Yeah. She felt pretty lousy after that."

Priss reached out and picked up the weasel curiously. "He got a name?"

"Yeah, it's—" Nene went to reach forward and take the critter back when a slice of hot pain ran through the depths of her injury and set her entire back rigid with fear of moving.

Priss winced, ever the incompetent one with the sick and injured. Partly it stemmed from her stunted ability to sympathies, mostly in was because she never offered her attention to Sylia's first aid lectures. She knew how to patch herself up in most situations and Priss's thoughts travelled along the lines of that was all that mattered.

She rose from the bed to fetch Nigel but a hand snatched around her wrist and barely managed to stop her.

"Wait," Nene muttered, rustling around in her shorts with her 'good arm', utterly devoid of colour and perhaps more pointedly her usual childish spirit. "Leon asked me to give you this."

With real effort she took out from her pocket a computer disk, one of a type that would plug into Priss's prized laptop.

"He asked me if your neighbourhood was near mines." Nene looked up with a delicate gaze, knowing almost without really thinking where Priss's temper was about to go.

"He what?!"

"Well I think he was working extra hours tonight and he seemed pretty insistent about this disk. Said you or Sylia would be interested in examining it. Actually I'd like to see it too…"

Nene trailed off, partly with the pain, partly under Priss's fiery glare which was pointed forcefully at the bedroom door.

"He knows this neighbourhood, he… that idiot!"

Nene cringed, then felt a lurching cramp in the pit of her stomach. She tried to catch it on her tongue but nonetheless a small, jittery moan escaped her throat and she squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to fight off the urge to hurl.

_'Not on Priss's carpet,' _she thought miserably to herself,

A firm hand braced her by the collarbone and stopped her from dive-bombing the floor with her forehead.

"Nigel," Nene vaguely heard Priss call calmly and the mechanic came through the doors noiselessly.

"How painless can you make this, getting all the debris out and staunching the wound?"

Nigel didn't directly answer Priss who supported her half-slouched, semi-naked friend easily with one hand, cautiously stroking up and down her back with the other. Instead he set the med kit aside on the bed and knelt unassumingly in front of Nene, her docile blue eyes still a little (enough) open.

"How do you feel?" he asked in a quiet, impersonal tone, being careful not to crowd the girl with her bareness right before him. Nene looked forward at him miserably but somehow managed a pallid smile.

"Good enough. I think I've caused enough bother tonight, so I promise I wont make anymore."

Priss felt a small unfamiliar twinge in her belly, perhaps a note of despair, she was not sure.

"Okay, that's fine then. Could you help her to lie on her front Priss? If she says she's 'good enough' then that'll do for us."

Priss did not argue, she wasn't even sure she wanted to although Nene's utter lack of colour and only semi-awareness made her feel more unsettled than often.

They moved her as comfortably as they could with a pillow under her small spread of breast to ease a little of the weight off her stomach. Perhaps it did the trick because Nene drifted off entirely, almost naturally it seemed. Nigel checked her pupils and her pulse and assured Priss as well as himself that all that need and could be done now was to clean and dress the wound. From there Priss easily allowed him to do all his own thing.

Nigel was efficient and delicate, working quickly but thoroughly. He deliberately took out the freshly clotted blood inside the short gash and with it dirt and even a small sparkling shard of the old knife's blade. Before any profound bleeding could begin again though he had her dressed and her arm in a sling for good measure. Priss had helped to prop her back up and against the corner wall and Nene never peaked once. Now she was resting with her chin pressed lightly to her collarbone.

"Try lying her on her side in about an hour or so, once she and the wound are settled a bit more. The sling should stop her from floundering her arm about too much, especially when she sleeps. Try and get her to drink water and eat something sugary when she wakes up, provided she's not in shock. After that it's up to her when she'll feel well enough to move and walk. _Don't_ let her go to _your _work for at least a fortnight, not if it's anything on the streets. I don't care what Sylia says."

Both were standing, staring evenly at each other, Priss taking Nigel's advice and understanding his want to leave now. With a silent flick of her eyes she promised this would be as involved as he'd get. If politics and police came into the matter then he had never even seen the two in his life for all she cared, whatever he wanted to claim. Although with what Leon had to answer for she was sure there would be no repercussions even if the murder ever actually took a hold of the interests of the force.

"Thanks," she offered casually and Nigel felt that was pretty good coming from Priss. He gave Nene one last look and actually smiled a little.

"She's not bad, for a blonde."

Priss blinked, confused, a little off-guarded by him comment, then looked back at the bed with him. She smiled herself, even dared a little laugh.

"If she thinks she's getting any sympathy from this then she's in for it."

They shared a moment of comfortable silence then Nigel began to see himself out. Priss followed.

"Thanks," she repeated again coolly.

Nigel waved his hand back as he opened the trailer door, content to leave these two girls alone with the rest of the mess. He disappeared into the early morning wordlessly and Priss let him go in his silence.

For a small while after she stood in the doorway of her bedroom, arms folded and legs rooted in perfect stillness. A few times unbeknown she let out a laboured sigh as if at odds with what to do next. Nene never stirred in the corner. The colour was not yet back in her cheeks but neither did the pain prohibit her sleep. She thought she might just let her stay like that till the few hours before dawn. Perhaps more difficult to decide though, she wondered what to tell Sylia in the morning…

----

'In other news this morning one of this precincts most notorious small time criminals has been stabbed to death underneath the city bypass. Goro Tanaka - often known better as 'Old Blunt' - was found by patrol officers in the early hours of this morning, apparently having been stabbed some hours before in what is currently believed to be gang warfare. Major Sa--'

Sylia flicked the channel impatiently once more, not in ill temper as such but frustrated nonetheless.

Priss stood quietly in the corner of the large living room, her interests suddenly perked by the news report. _'Certainly no sympathy in the script…' _she mused. She was sorely tempted to have Sylia turn it back but she didn't want any questions. It would be up to Nene whether or not to tell her - anyone - what she's done, no one else.

So Priss stood silently, just waiting for Sylia to ask, nothing else.

Linna suddenly battered through the door as if she'd taken it full pelt on foot for the whole ten or so blocks it took her to get to Sylia's from her own modest apartment. Face beetroot as if it were fit to burst and hair frazzled as if she had come via a wind tunnel she could only whisper an apology as she collapsed into the couch across from Sylia. The television in the background was droning out adverts now.

"Linna! The meeting was supposed to start half an hour ago! This is important!"

Linna tried a guilty grin but was still heaving breath in and out like a drowned thing. In the corner Priss smiled privately to herself.

"Never mind," Sylia said pointedly. "Where's Nene? Anyone?"

Priss turned back to the room calmly, dark eyes even and indifferent.

"Got a call from Leon this morning saying she'd be off for the next few days at least with a flu-thing that's going round the offices. Promised her boss she 'absolutely' was not moving from her bed till she'd sneezed out the last of it, not for anything. I'm assuming that meant us as well."

Sylia frowned. "Oh? And why'd he phone you about it?"

Priss actually did laugh this time.

"Thought I could convince her otherwise."

Sylia sighed but decided to leave the issue at that.

Priss decided to toss her the disk then and Sylia caught it with deadly reflexes.

"This might make a good starting point for the day."

And with that the meeting commenced.

Priss settled on an armchair set aside from the L shaped arrangement of couches, one leg tucked up with the foot out of sight underneath her thigh. There was contentment to be had in the knowledge that she had done right by Nene, that she had both saved her and let the girl save herself when she had plunged that knife into the old crone's chest.

There came about an ease in her conscience as well knowing that Nene was resting soundly back in her own apartment in her bed, where she would be quietly ecstatic to have Priss visit her that night with noodle soup and a small hastily chosen Get Well card.

Maybe they could become better friends yet.

-Fin


End file.
